Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1887-03-19

his soul-despite his array of figures, the
Malthusians and the prophets of ills. the
plan of creation will be worked out with
out interruption by man. All things that
he has devised to prolong life and shield
it from assault, are but parts of the natural
scheme that has developed orderly, and by
procession OF proofs not possible to be
denied, shown not only that man is ma
lures greatest and best work, but that he
is not to so outrm himself as to be driven
to abandonment of the paths that lead him
to broader intellectual fields and higher
possibilities.
But saving clause interjected by the
essayist reads. "If Nautilus had good basis
for his theory" and this expresses Knox's
own non-conviction that he had. In fact,
the Malthusians started wrong in assuming
that the rule of propagation is uniform in
its application: The rates of increase in
differing races do not establish the "doub-
ling every twenty-five years, nor yet do
the mortality tables show that the rule
Nautilus deduced is general The NAL
thusian estimate relating to the product
iyeness of the earth to the demands of the
increase of population, is demonstrated by
science, nature and experience to have been
shortsighted, and to have fallen behind the
real fact of food production and food in
vention The evidences of design in the
past, and the adaptation of its agencies to
their environments, are safer guides to
speculation as to the future of natural de-
sign, than the mathematical calculations
on basis that itself rests upon assumptions
as do those of the Malthusian school.
William Elder in his admirable treatise
on the subject few years ago, pointed out
that where mortality is largest, fecundity
is greatest, a rule that the Malthusians, to
whom Mr.. Knox is inclined to attach him
self, ignore. The same searcher after ma
lures truths advanced the doctrine that
has not been successfully controverted, that
fecundity is given in inverse proportion to
the development of the nervous system.
As this nervous development is next of kin
to intellectual progress, an accompaniment
of the latter is the unequal distribution of
action among the animal functions-or, as
he puts it in another form, The higher hui
man endowments, the moral and intellect
ual faculties, directly employing the brain
and external senses in great activity, seem
to be the special antagonists of the pro-
creative function"
So the remedy for over-population re-
lates not so much to food supplies, as to
the exercise of the intellectual functions,
and as the antagonist whom we pit
against Mr.. Knox, says, "sgch
cultivation and employment of
the powers of mind and body as will Sc
cure their equilibrium, will correct dispro
portion either of defect, or excess, in any
of them"
The better thought will concur with Mr..
Elder, and reject Mr.. Knox's fears, since
the former addresses the reason when he
contends that there is harmony between
the possibility of food supply and the de-
mand for it; that the waste of human life,
the deyising of means to favor abnormal
destruction, is not the corrective of an as
sumed blunder on the part of the Creator !;
that apparent excess is due to abnormal
preponderance of the animal over the in
tellectual and moral that, after all, popu-
lation is self-regulative in the establish
ment of an equilibrium of individual pro-
pensities, and resultingly in an adjustment
of supply and demand between sustenance
and requirement, in the relations of man
and aarfb